


Myth Maker

by grayglube, hasitsclaws



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 20:37:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2442281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hasitsclaws/pseuds/hasitsclaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She says nothing, disappears back into the shadows because she’s not counting on anything, not really. An eternal Pandora wondering if there’s still hope at the bottom of the box, right next to the thing that stored her own demons, her fears and her wishes and her love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Myth Maker

**Author's Note:**

> So grayglube and I got to talking, and a fic was born. 
> 
> Canon divergent, Kate doesn't escape being sacrificed by Tanner down in the labyrinth.

DARK THING,

MAKE A MYTH OF YOURSELF:

 

ALL WOMEN TURN INTO LILACS,

ALL MEN GROW SICK OF THEIR ERRANT SCENT.

YOU COULD LEARN

TO BUILD A WINDOW, TO CHANGE FLESH

INTO ISINGLASS, NOTHING

BUT A BRITTLE RIVER, A LOVE OF BONE."

—Jennifer Chang, from “This Corner of the Western World,” _The History of Anonymity_.

* * *

She’s been searching for a long time before she finds what she needs. When she first listens it’s overpowering, an endless litany. The cities hiss, sizzle, scream and the border is poison, sands moving and the endless rattle of bones. It’s in the quiet places that she finally finds him. Solitary but not unsilent and it’s easy. His insides oiled like game feathers, sins slicking off and nothing sticks, it’s a purity derived from a lacking.

She finds a sacrifice in the holy places. And there’s a purity of light, obliterating shadows long and short, a special connection with a God who makes warriors too. Belief and faith, and it will be enough to satisfy, to make her own gods supplicant, for a while, for long enough.

* * *

She watches it all from an outside view, feels like a bird sitting up on a wire watching a car crash, can’t steal her eyes away. She sees the way Tanner cuts her guts out, never knew they were attached so securely, like a crocheted doily on her grandmother’s dining room table. He strings them around the altar like a birthday banner. She hears herself screaming, alive and aware, hears the way it tapers off into desperate gurgles like there’s still a chance if she pulls hard enough, that she’ll be fine even as blood floods her mouth, streaming out like each drop is in a race with the others. Wonders which one is going to win– what’s going to be the final thing that really kills her.

       

Gets her answer when Tanner carves her heart out, pulls it from her chest, messy and spurting, the damp snap of muscle, stringy and tough, he pulls with two hands and the light leaves her eyes and–

Suddenly she’s gasping for breath, waking up lazy-limbed and tongue-heavy, body aching from every orifice. Swallowing down a scream, she jiggles her wrists, finds they’re free, feet too. Body untied, unmarred. Sits up, checks all limbs and patches of skin, counts her back molars, the notches on her spine. Every piece intact, baby fresh, brand new, sparkly clean like she’s been scrubbed with lye soap and holy water.

       

One glance around the dark room tells her she’s alone. There’s no movement, no sound. Stale air– she wishes Seth would come and save her again. Or Ranger Gonzalez. Or her daddy. Or Scott. Or _Richie_.

       

But no one comes to save her.

* * *

The bar smells like iron and ash. Singed spots on the stone and the floor is a torturous maze of blocked sunlight, they sit at a righted table, seething separately, over the state of things, over each other.

Common ground found so suddenly, but it can’t repair everything, damage is done and Carlos is thankful for the interruption and sudden noise.

Tangling with a curtained doorway Professor Tanner, incongruous in dusted over leather, trips through strewn glassware, looking first at his feet and then to the table.

“Professor. You’re still alive, congratulations.”

Narciso has a tic timed to when Carlos speaks, a clench in his jaw, an ache of sudden venom slipping down. Half-hidden irritation. It’s grown in intensity over the course of the night to a flare of heat that has him trying to keep his fangs up.

And, to his credit, Tanner takes just a half-step back and looks only fleetingly at the door. His hands are rust colored, filthy and they smell like iron, too.

He’s about to speak when he flinches, drops what he holds in his hands with a wet, rubberish smack on the stone, “Whoopsie,” he mumbles some half-laugh from deep in his gut, “sucker still kicks.”

Carlos grins, Narciso’s cheek tics, again. He does not like when Carlos grins.

“Does it?”

And Narciso does not like the cheer in his tone.

Professor Tanner collects the organ from the floor, walks the steps it takes to meet Carlos and holds it out, two hands, like it weighs the world.

And Narciso knows what it is.

Depending on the man asked they’d say it’s a sacrifice, or a now holy relic. Narciso would call it a replacement, “I’ll take that, Carlito.”

The heart in his hand is a bloody fist, clenching, shaking, it only beats harder when it’s held.

Fear, maybe, or rage.

* * *

“No one’s come. They haven’t even tried.”

She’s still holding his hand in hers when she says it. Her nails are dark like wine, they scrape his knuckles, his palm, and he’s half-hard over the simple intimacy.

Her eyes are kohl dark and her voice is still a purr, “The gods are satisfied.”

“That you’re free?” He wishes they could stop, for a while. His vision is clear but his eyes burn, he does not know where his black sunglasses went. Lost. Crushed underfoot on the dusty floor of the Twister.

“As long as the temple has a believer they are satisfied.”

“You mean Carlos?”

Carlos the greedy, a fucking Judas. Really. She smiles, thumb rubbing the inside of his wrist, tasting his pulse through the skin, “I don’t think Carlos believes in anything, not anymore.”

The day’s heat makes even the asphalt look like a mirage through the windshield, he switches gears, foot heavy on the gas.

* * *

Narciso feels his appetite spoil once the conversation starts, “We don’t need another girl thinking she’s a little queen, making little pets to snap at us.”

The bemused expression Carlos give back he could do without, “Is that really the be-…”

With a hand up to stop him from going on Narciso leans back, fingers laced over his stomach, considers, in jest, the idea, “Underage _gringa chica_ , here?”

There is a long pause that Carlos does not try to spew more nonsense into.

“No.” Narciso says, finality in the word. But there’s a clench in Carlos’ jaw from across the desk.

“Wait,” and with a slow smile, Narciso tries for levity, “We can put her on stage, dress her in red, white, and blue. Some sparklers and batons. A sash that says, Miss America.”

Carlos has gone stony, and Narciso laughs, “Is that what you would like to do? Hmm? No. She stays. Down in the labyrinth.”

Carlos shuts the door very carefully on the way out and Narciso finds his appetite returning.

He sighs, waits until he hears Carlos’ footsteps fading down the hall before he speaks.

“Now, you I can stand. Quiet, it’s nice to have quiet. And the maintenance is much easier.”

Narciso cuts a smile crosswise over to the basin beside him. In it something moves. Steady, metronome beat, the perfect time-keeper, perfectly measured. Like a rolex, except this clock ticks.

There’s a snake curling out from under his chair, it moves over his shoes. He scowls, and then, with practiced ease slits it from one head to the other over the still beating heart.

“Salud.” He drinks from his own glass.

* * *

She gets up, world in vertigo colors, stained glass windows in a temple of sin. Steadies herself on the altar, one where they give you blood instead of crackers and cheap, stale wine. Puts on her best brave face and wanders back into the labyrinth. She can feel something tugging her along as she goes, wonders if she’s going to _see_ something again, like her momma taking another bottle full of pills, or maybe her daddy really flipping the car on purpose, finishing up what the pills hadn’t done yet. Scott and his gun becoming a news story after lacrosse practice.

Murder or love, love or murder-- now she understand why everyone in the Bible was always so sad.

       

Shivers like a tingle, like a memory. She keeps going forwards, figures there has to be a way out.

Only, thing is, there isn’t.

She must keep going for years before she finally stops, sinks into the middle of the hoodoo stone halls, knees up to her chest, cradle position, trying to hold in a hysterical bubble of laughter making its way up her throat. She closes her eyes, shakes her head.

       

It’s only when there’s movement to her side that she lets her eyes snap open again, watches the vague outline of a boy or maybe something more make its way towards her. _Too tired to fight back_ , she thinks as the figure gets closer. _Just wanna give up._

And then it’s Scott who comes for her, tells her about the men upstairs, how she’s stuck down here.

“Am I dead?”

Scott slides down the wall, knees open, fingers digging in the dirt between his worn and warping sneakers, “Depends on how you look at it.

“So I’m dead-- why aren’t I in heaven with momma? Where’s daddy?” She watches her brother quick swallow, like he’s trying to gulp down a lie, and look up into the dark, like there is an answer above them that only he can see now.

“Dad’s dead, in here, somewhere. Ranger Gonzalez put a stake through him. It was quick.”

There’s the feeling of something inside, a bathtub with the plug pulled out, the unexpected false bottom on her insides, “Why?”

“He didn’t want to be a family anymore.” And he says it calmly, collected, like the words don’t mean anything to him even though they mean too much.

“And who’s fault is that, Scott?” Her voice is small, lilting. She already knows the answer.

Her brother’s face slackens, but when he stands up it’s mean like a child’s, pugnacious. And she knows he’s going to walk away from her. “I just figured I’d tell you so you wouldn’t be walking around down here for no reason.” Kate doesn’t watch him go, cries circles on the dirty knees of her jeans until the denim itches and her head hurts.

In the dark she prays, but no one answers.

She thinks of God’s Judgement, sins of the father and mother, wayward children bleating like sheep before the wolves come.

* * *

“You are jaguar deer. A hunter. The brother who rules underneath the earth.”

Her nails scrape across his nipple and her red red red lips leave marks on his mouth, throat, down down down, but not from her lipstick that’s stuck to her mouth like tar, impossible, untraceable, her fangs kiss his skin and he thrums, arches, mewls like a boy being touched by a girl for the first time.

It’s always like the first time for him, she smiles with the practiced ease of someone who’s well-acquainted with the dance.

She kisses him and it doesn’t taste like blood or dust or anything but her lipstick, and his face mottles to snake scale and the dark wine of her lips, and her nails are pointed, glossy and they look like fresh scabs on the curve and crest of each hip.

And when she’s on top her knees moving against the bedsheets, wide, slipping open and the slick heat of her dancing down until he’s rooted so deep, so fast he loses his breath and she smiles down at him, laughs softly sometimes. Indulgent when he comes up and turns her, back to the mattress pushing her up it on his way back in.

He’s breathless and she’s a goddess of more than what they have her written down for.

He says his prayers between her thighs and she absolves him of everything, blood, body, all the sacraments for his little black soul.

And that’s hers too.

* * *

It takes a long time before she understands the trick of it. Dips, curves, notches in a leather belt. There’s a certain way to navigate, a tug inside of her bones. She knows what is darkness and what is the inbetween. Because her heart gives this place life, the visions do not come to her. The monsters do not come to her.

She has free roam. Wild tiger running around in its cage, or maybe something more like a frightened deer darting between spatters of shotgun barrels. She reads the symbols on the wall and she understands blueprints, directions, roadmarkers. They aren’t Tetris pieces-- they’re locks, and her touch is the key.

One day she finally ventures upstairs. The men in charge do not notice, or if they do, they pretend not to. She flits about the main floor, scooping up dust on her fingertips. It isn’t a titty bar anymore. Isn’t much of anything, really. No music, no lights, no shows to perform. Just an empty stage, vacant tables, rotting alcohol and stale venom.

Behind the stage is a network of rooms, each more intricate than the next-- she never goes into the one where she kissed him. Instead she finds the last trapped girl-woman’s room, the lush bed, a luxury she hasn’t seen in years. Lays down, curls up, _sleeps_.

When she wakes up another year has passed, fled by with ripped calendar notes on the small hand-held in Narciso’s office. She heard the monster talking to her in her dreams.

Scott is there, sitting next to the bed, his eyes resting on her intently. “Morning, Sleeping Beauty.”

“You know I hate that fairytale.”

“What, you want Snow White instead?”

“The huntsman did cut out her heart.”

Scott is silent, body still, not a nerve out of place. Finally, he says, “I’ve got something for you.”

“What?”

He reaches across the space between them, sets a bag there on the mattress next to her head. Kate blinks, scrunches up her nose because it smells dusty and old, like he got it years ago but finally had enough courage to face her. She opens it up slowly, looks down inside and tilts her head, seeing her old Bible, her favorite hairbrush, some other small, unimportant meaningful things.

“Where did you…?”

“The R.V.’s still parked out front. I can bring in anything you want out of it, at night I mean.”

She looks at him, at the guilty edge to the slant of his mouth. He isn’t a child anymore. He isn’t a man either. He’s forever in between, and he’s sorry for what he did, and she hates him for it in this moment, kicks the bag away and hears it land with a satisfying crash on the ground.

“I don’t want anything.”

“I’m trying, Kate.”

“Then say you’re sorry.”

He doesn’t.

* * *

“You are thinking of your brother, again.” She stops moving atop him, he’s going limp inside of her, lost somewhere in his own mind. The labyrinth from the Twister has seemed to replace the neurons there, knotting axons into rotting bundles of pink matter. “Mi amor?”

He shakes his head.

“Then who?” Her question is a sinking ship.

A shrug, something non distinct, maybe a hiss slipping past lush lips. “Nothing.”

It doesn’t feel right to tell her that sometimes, when he doesn’t expect it, he thinks of green eyes in a heart-shaped face, cheap swimming pools and little, silver crosses around slender necks.

He has no right to miss that, not when it’s gone, dead, but on nights where the moon is a blank face in the sky, he thinks of how it was never supposed to hurt like this, she promised that it wouldn’t.

* * *

“The world’s grown quiet,” Carlos says.

Narciso flicks a lit-stained match across the room, watches it shatter against the wall before wooden shards fall into a wire wastebasket, he puffs his cigar carelessly. “It is only because you are not listening close enough, Carlito.”

Carlos’ eyes flicker to the basin next to the desk, covered with a pink silk doily, feminine and dusty. He doesn’t hear anything, not until he opens his mind to the possibilities of it, and there’s a small _thump_. Steady, strong, angry.

He hears her ghost flittering by on the other side of the door, ear pressed to the frame, little pink lips sucked between her teeth as she holds her breath, waits.

A smile without humor, a laugh full of malice, Narciso blows out dragon smoke. “It is very sad when a daughter of the Lord knows more of eternity than a son of the Night.”

“You sound like a Johnny Cash song.”

Narciso shakes his head.

Somewhere, away and down, there’s a clap and boot beat. Carlos startles, Narciso laughs. “Listen, someone thinks you’re funny.”

* * *

“I think they’re going to hide it.”

She glances up from the latest cover of Seventeen, finally gave in and let Scott bring her things. He sneaks past the border sometimes, gets treats she used to love but can no longer appreciate, like teen gossip rags and cans of Cherry coke and glittery eyeliner. She takes them anyways, feels like a mother with an infinite stock of her child’s finger paintings, _look mommy, look, do you love me?_

He still hasn’t said he’s sorry.

And even God needs to be asked for forgiveness before a sin’s absolved.

“Hide what?” she asks, rolling onto her side to look at him.

Scott keeps his eyes on his hands, where he’s trying to make cat’s cradle, Jacob’s ladder, a hand snare with wiry bits of animal guts, his latest meal. “What else?”

“Why would they do that?” She knows her heart is Narciso’s little pet, something to keep him company when an endless life becomes dull.

“Something’s coming,” Scott says. He looks at her, like he can see right through her, like he knows that she no longer dreams of one sided conversations, but glass-blue eyes instead. Sometimes it’s amber eyes, too. Sometimes it’s nothing but blood.

Kate hides her smile, her disappointment. “He isn’t listening.”

“Not yet.”

* * *

It’s strange when he sleeps now, not as he expected. Not the monsters in coffins in the movies, but, rather, a snake in hibernation. He still lays on his stomach, the way he always did. Still kicks his feet right before he reaches that place in oblivion.

His eyelashes flutter and he knows that he’s dreaming, can tell the difference between visions and reality now that he’s 20/20.

When he looks he’s in the Twister, smells like sex and venom and the sparkling cream the women wore that made their skin brown sugar diamonds, skirt stuff he doesn’t know the name of. He’s in the back room, sitting on the couch, but there’s no one dancing on his lap, no temptation that isn’t the real thing.

She’s here. Sitting beside him, same flannel and battered Doc Martens, all green eyes and little girl lipstick. She looks like a ripe peach on a Sunday morning, hair curling up around her face, dry from the pool. He smells the hint of chlorine on her, cigarette smoke and something else, something dangerous. Chemicals, sand, ashtray, metal, cordite, sunscreen, gasoline, mottling, shed scales, and the absence of blood. He can smell that, on everything, everywhere, but she’s bloodless.

“You’re dead,” he says.

Kate shrugs her shoulders, bones up, pinched like a bird’s. “Not really.” Her hands tucked under her thighs pull at the cushions. Her hair hides half her face.

He shakes his head, unbelieving. It’s got to be a trick, of some kind. A fantasy his mind made up. He doesn’t let himself think about her anymore. He doesn’t let himself think about Seth, either. “You died, went to heaven with your preacher daddy and your Bruce Lee lookalike brother so you’re not here.”

“You told me you thought I belonged here,” she says, only it’s more of a sneer. He always knew she could be cruel, but he’s never expected it. Not like this. He’s never expected it would hurt, feel like a hole through his chest, the way it was when he got shot. It’s not the grimace and screech of the teenage girl she should be, or the hell hath no fury of a woman, it’s toneless, weighty chastisement, the wrap on the knuckles that makes your hand feels like it’s broken. Preacher’s daughter telling him he’s done wrong.

“Yeah, so? It was just something I said.” Frowns, shades his eyes, harder to do without the thick rims of his glasses to hide behind.

“You were right,” she says, letting him play the allotted part of de Rais. “And now I’m stuck here. You prophesied me into a forever,” her head shifts, eyes measuring the room, her mouth pinched, insulted. “In a titty bar. Fuck you.”

“Stop messing with my head. You’re dead.” He covers his ears like he did when he was a child, when their father was beating Seth black, purple blue in the next room.

She sitting on the low table in front of his knees, when she has his eyes her fingers pull down the collar of her henly, her chest an awful mess.

“Professor Tanner killed me with your knife, how sick is that?” And she’s laughing, mocking him, like a girl in the schoolyard picking on the outcast, on the boy who asked her to Homecoming but didn’t have a chance.

“That’s not true,” he says, lines his teeth in a dark row like defense, scowl a barrier, a blockade. “The Ranger stabbed me with it, he had my knife.”

“Where did he get it?”

“I don’t know.”

Kate shakes her head, looks at the curtains on the doorway that blocks them off from the rest of the world. Her fingers idle on her collar still, and there’s the ruin of blood and tissue seeping through the front.

He remembers kissing her here, her kissing him. She was soft, round, more fragile than anything he was used to. “ _Why did you say that?_ ”

And neither of them will ever know the answer, if it was her or Santanico or him. Maybe the Goddess had been right when she said Kate was meant to be here for a reason. Maybe Kate opened Richie’s eyes more than Santanico could.

“Can you feel it?” Kate asks, turning her head to look at him.

“Feel what?” He doesn’t feel anything.

“My heartbeat.”

He makes a face like he doesn’t understand, brows drawing together, suspicion etched in the lines of his mouth. Fingers curl against the satin couch, leaving claw marks, tearing out stuffing like tearing out entrails. A blink of the eyes and Kate no longer looks the way he remembers, she’s worse blood blooming a deeper shade of red on her clothes-- her skin is sallow, rotting, falling off at the the joints. Her hair is limp and dead, eyes glazed over, no longer summer-leaf crisp. Where her torso should be is a bloody, mangled mess, maggots crawling through ripped flesh, filling up crevices where her heart once once, putrefaction and the rancidity of a body breaking down sticks inside his nose and throat.

And he feels it, the steady _thump thump, thump thump_ emanating up through the floorboards, the tell tale heart.

His mouth opens, his eyes close, and when he looks at her again, she’s back to normal. Preacher’s daughter, fille fatale, raw bleeding bait on a jail line, hook and sinker.

“I can’t,” she says, smiling at him. “I bleed too much.”

The vision shatters like a crowbar through a car window, stolen away in black gloved hands. He wakes up gasping to see the sun sinking low on the horizon, room filled with warped versions of red and pink coming through the black-out curtains on the hotel window.

“What did you see?”

When he looks over it’s Santanico speaking, sitting at the table, painting her nails a violent red.

He looks at her and wonders how long she’s been lying, knows it’s been the entire time.

“The truth.”

* * *

“Where would you have me put it?”

“Not you. Me.” Narciso holds the cold, beating organ in his hands, cupping it softly, stroking at the aorta like he’s saying goodbye.

“Back in the jar? Like the snake?”

Narciso shakes his head. “Somewhere new. Somewhere warm.”

* * *

“You sleep like the dead, now.”

“Was that supposed to be funny?”

Scott shakes his head, curls a strand of hair behind her ear, delicate. “Are you dreaming about _them_?”

She jerks away like he’s just slapped her, angry, embarrassed, despondent. “That’s none of your business.”

“I knew it.”

Later she realizes she _doesn’t_ know who Scott meant. She thought he meant the Geckos, but then there’s momma and daddy too.

* * *

The sun’s heavy on his back, sinking on the horizon.

He’s got his blue agave, got his El Rey, but his brother’s never come, and this place isn’t perfect. Paradise isn’t the same when there’s no one to share it with.

“I think you’re the brother of the light.”

He blinks, steadies his hands on the sand, slipping towards the bullets burning a hole in his back pocket. When he looks there’s a flash of pale skin, brown hair, forgiveness falsely received.

For a moment he wonders if he’s sleeping, gives up on it and lays his head back down. “I was expecting you to make it, out of everyone else.”

“You shouldn’t always trust your intuition.”

He snorts out a laugh, holds his breath when soft fingers skirt over his hair, comforting, bloody, leaving scratches against his scalp. “Maybe I should’ve come back for you.”

“That wasn’t your job, Seth.”

“It could’ve been my penance.”

“Maybe it will be, someday.”

He wakes up to the sound of sirens, gunshot in the shoulder, passenger seat full of cash. Looks around wildly thinking she’s still there, but it’s just an empty cab, an open road full of nothingness.

* * *

She watches steadily as Narciso locks it up, buries it deep.

He looks in her direction like he knows she’s there, and he’s smiling. “You could search for a thousand years and never find it again, _niña_.” Tilts his head, cold calculation, and a certain fondness there, too, a sense of familiarity. “But it’s not memory you’re counting on, is it?”

She says nothing, disappears back into the shadows because she’s not counting on anything, not really. An eternal Pandora wondering if there’s still hope at the bottom of the box, right next to the thing that stored her own demons, her fears and her wishes and her love.

She dreams.

* * *

He doesn’t dream of her again for weeks. Until one night, moon vanished from the sky, heavy-hung by clouds, she’s there again. Sitting at the edge of the pool, its drained bottom looking like an open, gaping mouth as her toes dangle over the ledge. She’s got a cigarette filter between her teeth, but she doesn’t inhale.

“Are you okay?” he asks, automatic script, could be a soliloquy if you delve deeper, like MacBeth, or Hamlet, or even DeNiro if you were asking Seth.

She kicks her feet again, flicking at imaginary water. “I should’ve listened to my momma about stranger danger.”

He laughs, but it’s devoid of humour or emotion. “I thought it was easier to talk to strangers.”

“That’s what I mean,” she says.

“Oh,” he answers, and there’s nothing left to say as the conversation falls into the empty pool, black maw of it eating up any other words they could have for each other, any idea of forgiveness.

He watches as she plucks at the cross around her neck, picks it up, puts it in her mouth instead of the cigarette, like she’s partaking in the last feast, eating the body of the holy savior, but there isn’t any blood.

And when he thinks that, he feels a sudden weight in his hands, familiar, heavy, spindles around the eye, carbon and dust, shaped from bone like most violent things. Something inside of him recoils, a snake ready to strike.

She turns to face him just as he lunges, cross dropped out of her mouth, lying on her skin like a target, watches with vacant eyes as he pushes the knife through her chest.

“I don’t have a heart,” she says, and he remembers those words from a long time ago, two girls mirrored by the harsh bite of the world’s cruelty.

His expression is blank, pale anger, “But wait, let me guess: you felt that?”

“I don’t feel anything, it’s empty.”

“What’s empty?”

She stands, stretches, smirk making her mouth look like a joke, like an invitation, to a laugh, a swim, something more eternal or temporary. She points. “The pool.” Says it so simply it makes him think he’s dumb, that he’s missed something obvious. He hates the feeling of vulnerability that comes from being struck dumb.

“What?”

She’s facing him, smiling, but it’s sinister, haunting, wrong. Arms wide and feet stepping back.

And his hands reach out, too slow, or she’s too fast, falling, and he waits for a crack and crunch and he’s looking over the pool, looking at stars, looking at eyes. Awake now, in bed, there’s a Goddess awake, sinuous against his side, and her eyes are dark and deep and there are miles to go and he can’t sleep. Doesn’t want to. For more reasons than one.

* * *

“It wasn’t an accident was it? That we brought them with us.”

“Not them, just the girl.”

“Why?”

“She was what they needed, to replace me.”

* * *

“I say we liven this place up again, re-open.” It’s Carlos who says it, of course it is.

Narciso’s jaw tics, fangs extending. “I say not.”

“The Lords are demanding more blood.” Narciso blinks, looks over to Carlos’ little henchman, the girl’s brother stuck here just like her.

“And what do you know of sacrifice, truly?” Narciso sneers, doesn’t like the coldness in the boy’s tone, the confidence and the suspicion.

“I know that you’re on your last leg,” the boy says, and was he not related to the girl, did not keep her docile, Narciso would tear his throat out. “Got any better plans?”

Carlos smiles, Narciso’s jaw tics, they both know who’s won.

“Fine. But no more pets that snap. Control them. Keep them quiet. We do not need another uprising.”

“As you wish,” Carlos says; he’s still smiling.

* * *

She’s by the wall of glass, a window out into the world so far below. The way a Goddess looks out on it, from above, from the sky, from the modern mountain of steel and icy black panes.

And she is everything he has ever wanted, and before he says anything he knows he still has her, can always have her, but only if he doesn’t say anything.

It isn’t until he knows she isn’t going to turn and look at him that he knows she isn’t everything. If she’d turned, and looked and smiled, he’d had gone down on his knees. But she doesn’t and he says, plain and soft, “You lied to me.”

Her answer is almost a hiss. “Never.”

“Lies of omission are still lies.”

“No.” She persists, reflection of her eyes, in the glass nothing but a shine, black on the black sky, depthless, forever. No patterns in the stars and no sun.

“And you’re dying.”

“Never.” He thinks she doesn’t understand what that word means. Maybe eternity’s just a fucking headtrip that way. She sounds amused, like he’s made a comparison between two such unlike things it’s ludicrous, unbelievable, endearing.

“Liar.”

He feels like he’s a child speaking back to their mother. She is, in some ways.

“I can’t die.”

But her tone is flat, practiced, convinced, and he thinks the window, the reflection of her face is who she’s really speaking to, five-hundred years and counting and she’s been the only constant thing. The only thing that hasn’t changed.

He shakes his head, free hand in the pocket of his slacks, he’s got what he wanted to show her in the other, the weight of it is heavier than he expected. Heavier than a gun or what he got in exchange for his mind, his body, his soul. “Now I know, you’re definitely lying. Because, you _are_ dying. I can tell.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Don’t you want to know how I know that?”

She says nothing, an ethereal pillar of stone. For once he wishes she would be anything other than calm, anything other than timeless. But sooner or later she’s going to be. Not even Gods live forever.

“Here,” he says, hands her the heavy pillowcase but she doesn’t take it. Not at first. Then he looks at her, eyes find eyes, and her grasp fits in his own. _Goodbye_. “It’s yours anyway.”

He thinks the reason he slept so well for the past few nights was because it was dying inside of him, and during the night, when she had gone, it came up, an endless heaving, and on the expensive marble floor of the penthouse bathroom he looked at its pulpish and bloody coils, feeling like a mother with a stillborn.

Disbelief, unbelieving, he thinks he’d been just that for longer than he took notice of.

* * *

“He’s coming.”

“I told him he didn’t have a chance in Hell.”

Scott looks at his sneakers, still the same after all this time. “You’re forgetting he’s the Devil, Kate. The Devil’s always got a chance, here. Besides, I’ve bought us time. Why do you think there’s a show again?”

She sighs and takes a sip of flat Coke-a-Cola, taste of liquid ash in her mouth. “Maybe I don’t want a show; maybe I don’t want him to come.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Shut up.”

* * *

He stops to feed on the way there.

It’s messy and it’s violent, skin ripping loose of muscle, visceral ripping loose of bone. Afterwards he buries the evidence in the mud out behind some old church on the edge of town, doesn’t both with a marker. Wipes his hands clean, fixes the lapels of his jacket. Walks away like nothing ever happened, until suddenly the church bells chime and he’s looking up, moon hung low on the horizon.

A door opens, either in his mind or in front of him, the soft sound of his name like the whisper of someone in confession.

He steps inside, finds the aisles empty, air heavy with the smell of incense and rotting wood. The aisle to worship is small and cramped, pews huddled together, a gaunt and tortured Jesus looking out over all.

Blinks, wonders if he’s going to turn to ash for crossing into a holy threshold. But he didn’t on hallowed ground, never has over running water. Sees his reflection in the mirror like everyone else, can take a damn good polaroid picture. Still likes Italian food, still touches crosses. Bela fucking Lugosi’s got nothing on him.

When he sits in the front pew the door closes yet the room becomes no less stagnant. He hears someone say his name again, and he knows this is more than just a vision. With Santanico it was like an itch-- spiders crawling up through his brain stem, into his occipitals. This is different, less jarring, more like falling asleep.

Money for the ferryman on his closed eyes, he wonders if she’d taste like lethe and gallow rope if he tapped one of her veins. “Kate,” he says, answers the call.

And when he looks up she’s standing in the church, there’s a statue, it might be Mary, he isn’t sure but it has a lurid red heart on its chest, her fingers touch it.

“I can get it back for you.” He doesn’t exactly know the mechanics of it, if it’s like swallowing a snake or putting a present under the Christmas tree. Not that he had any presents on Christmas-- his life never afforded him or Seth those kinds of luxuries.

“I think it’s too late for that.”

“I thought you were a believer.”

“I am. I just don’t think you can do it.” She seems bored, disinterested, looking at her nails and the chipped paint on them. He wonders how you can paint your nails when you’re a ghost.

“I made it through once.” Conviction, arrogance, things he’s always been good at. It’s not like with human interaction, easier to take care of yourself than someone else. But he wants to try and do that for once, he owes her that much.

“You had your brother with you.” She sits next to him in the pew.

“I don’t need him to help plan a job,” he says, tries to take her hand but she pulls away from him like his touch is poisonous, and maybe it is, like he would know, like Santanico would’ve ever told him when she didn’t tell him a lot of things.

“It might just be easier to find a rock in the desert and wait for the sun to come up on it.” She’s looking at the altar, at the candles there for lost souls like maybe there’s one for her own.

“You’re angry, I get that.”

“No, Richie. I’m not angry,” she says, and the way she says it is exasperated, tired, worn down to bones that don’t exist. Finally lets him touch her and his hand goes right through her wrist, her radial; through her thigh where there should be a beating pulse from her femoral, but there’s nothing, not even a scent. “I’m dead, but I’m not, do you see my problem?”

Her face puckers, going all pinched with pain, like she wants to cry. She’s can’t she’s dead.

“It’s my fault, you were right.” It’s not his right to play the burning man-- that was always Seth, trying to emulate their father even after he was gone-- but since becoming undead himself, he’s turned a little more prone to self-pity.

A sigh, her hair swishing over her shoulder and he remembers she smelled like strawberries, like a little girl and sunshine and he _wanted_ and maybe that was wrong, but this is worse. “It’s not your fault and you can’t help. You told me I wasn’t looking close enough, remember. That this place was beautiful under the surface. ”

“Is it?”

“It is, but it’s not real either.”

“You’re like a saint, you know,” he says, because she is, or at least she is in the way he pretends to know about saints.

“You mean like a martyr?”

“Yeah.”

“You know anything about saints?” she asks, keen and aware, may be young but is still wiser than her years. Death didn’t do that to her. Life did. Blood in a pool and on some cheap motel towel, empty basins leftover after slaughter in the form of a car crash. Echoes from a time when he wasn’t transformed and she wasn’t dead:

“ _She didn’t get migraines._ ”

“ _Are you playin’ some kinda trick on me?_ ”

The fleams in the candles dance hard to th left, wind blowing, but they don’t go out, they sizzle, their red glass votives makes him wonder what Hell looks like.

“Not really,” he says.

She smiles something that isn’t actually a smile. “They give them happy endings and painless deaths but that’s because you’re little when you learn about them. Like Santa Claus.”

“Your death wasn’t painless?” His hadn’t been either-- it’d been cheap and easy and his maker had smelled like a cemetery, grim reaper with fangs instead of a scythe, wrapped up in a pretty, lying package.

She doesn’t answer him; looks at the candles again. “You can’t help me.”

“It’s not like I haven’t planned a prison break before.”

There’s silence where her voice should be.

He thinks she’s gone, he stares at the cross with its suffering Jesus. He knows the feeling.

Over the back of pew she leans in next to him, still here, still not. Her eyes stare forward, “Coming to my rescue, guess that makes you Saint George.”

He smirks, “What’s he do?”

Kate shrugs, “Kills a dragon, saves a princess.”

“I can do that,” he says. He’s already slayed the dragon with some fingers down the throat and a Halloween candy carrying case.

She shakes her head. “I’m not a princess, Richie.”

And then she’s vanished, a wet mark of blood in her place, staining the purity of the pew.

Blinks his eyes twice, clenches hands into fists bone-knuckle white.

She doesn’t want him to come, fine. But he’s going to save her, even if only for his own benefits. Little boy on a church pew and Hell suddenly seems so very real, he thinks he can smell its sulfur but it’s just the candle wicks and wax and the wood of the hard bench beneath his legs.

* * *

It’s not hard to pick him out amongst all the others.

In the weeks since the Twister’s reopened, hundreds of people have come, and less than half of that have left. The show doesn’t turn gruesome every night, better to hold off suspicion that way, but on the evenings where the Gods want blood, they get it.

Richie looks different when he walks in. Doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb the way he did the first time, blends. But she knows it’s him. Beard and trucker cap not nearly enough to erase from her mind the way he walks. She watches from the corner, peeking out through a curtain, hands gripping the fabric so tight her knuckles start to crack.

“I told you he’d come.”

“He’s a stubborn little shit.”

Scott pokes his head out just past hers, looks around at the mean, dangerous faces on the floor until he spies the one Kate’s eyes are rooted to. “He looks like he’s trying too hard.”

“Narciso hasn’t noticed him.”

“Carlos will.”

“Then maybe you should keep Carlos preoccupied.” She glances up at Scott, quirks a brow, smirking.

He rolls his eyes, gives a heavy exhale. “As you bid, _mistress_.”

She shakes her head and laughs as he walks away, before, finally, taking another look onto the main floor. Finds Richie instantly, sitting at one of the tables, watching the act on stage in a careless manner. But then his shoulders freeze up and his head is turning, eyes searching for eyes.

Before he can see her, Kate vanishes.

* * *

The labyrinth has changed since he was last here. Less like a maze, more like a forest. He takes his time looking through it, moves at night when the club’s alive, hides during the day so no one notices him. The last thing he wants is Carlos or Narciso finding out he’s here-- they’d rather take Kate’s heart and destroy it than risk a Gecko pulling a fast one over on them a second time.

On the fifth night he runs into Scott. “You’re alive too, Bruce Lee?”

The kid flashes his eyes yellow, face pulled up with scales. “More or less.”

“Where’s Kate?”

“She’ll find you when she’s ready,” Scott says, giving a careless shrug. “Until then, make sure no one sees you. I can only hold Carlos off for so long.”

He begins to walk away then, but before he can disappear around a never-ending corner, Richie calls out for him. “Scott, wait.”

The kid glances back, annoyed. “What, Gecko? Just because you’re here to save my sister doesn’t mean we’re friends, stop wasting my time.”

He rolls his eyes, shouldn’t have expected anything different. “I just wanted to ask if she’s okay.”

“I don’t know why you care,” Scott says, looking irate and defensive, stronger than Richie remembers. “Don’t know why you came for her, really. She told me that you two kissed. What, you think that means you’re destined to be, or something?”

“I don’t know.”

Scott squints, long moments of silence before his tone softens and he says, “She’s okay, Romeo. More or less. Just wait for her.”

But it takes weeks before she appears to him.

It happens suddenly, blink of the eye, fenderbender kind of moment. He’s sitting inside of Santanico’s old room, trying to put the pieces of the maze together, and suddenly a fine fingered hand loops over his shoulder, points to an invisible map on the table like a red pin on an atlas, take me here.

He looks up and over, watches as she slinks back, the same girl he remembers from years ago. Time has not aged her like it has not aged him.She looks soft and sweet as ever, big plate full of cherry pie, alamode. Her clothes have not differed save for she’s gotten rid of the overtops, shed her shoes in favor of socked feet.

“Hi, Richie,” she says when he stands, looking at her in disbelief.

“Kate.” A statement, a question, one that doesn’t have any answers.

“I told you not to come.”

“You’ve been hiding from me.”

She sighs, runs her fingers over the spines of old worn books, magic and hymns, poems and curses, tales and woes, potions and mathematical equations. “So like you,” she muses. “Talking _at_ people instead of to them.”

It’s strange how she says it. Having known him mostly after her demise and his downfall. Life after death, dreams and visions and prophetic feel of certain fate.

Silence, his tongue flicking at his teeth but there’s nothing to say. Just watches her as she spins on her heel, walks over towards the bed and lays down on the chaise at the end of it. She lounges back lazily like a cat, body stretched out, prone, vulnerable. She’s anything but.

He looks at her tiny, little feet, her bony ankles and the sharp lines of her calves. Pillow soft thighs, the secret, untouched in-between of her legs. Follows it up to the small swell of her stomach, still round with baby-fat. Filling-out waist, small breasts, the curved bones of her collar. When he focuses on her neck he can’t find a pulse, no prominent arteries. He imagines she’d still taste like sunshine and scraped knees if he drank from her, like iron and vanilla and chasers.

“You _can_ touch me, y’know?” she says, tone bored, placid. His eyes snap up to hers, springtime, cut grass, infectious. “Here, I’m as real as the next undead girl.”

He takes a step forwards and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t bat a lash. Takes another and another, has seen her with his own eyes but can’t believe she’s real unless he feels it. Dying man in the desert drawn to a cool drink of water, even if it’s poisonous, even if it evaporates with one touch.

“I thought you didn’t pick up on underage girls,” she says, making him pause. A tilt of her head, a strand of hair twirled around her fingertip. “Then again, I guess I’ve been legal for a long time now. Technically.”

“You’d still think I’m despicable,” he says.

She smiles, all teeth, plum-pink gums. “Probably.”

And he thinks maybe he isn’t the night in black armor and she’s not a damsel in a dragon’s treasure trove, he has a fleeting feeling he’s John the Baptist and she’s about to dance the dance of seven veils, ask for his head in recompense.

“What if I just want to hold your hand?”

“You’re not good at human contact, Richard,” she says, and it might’ve been a slap to the face, once, a long time ago.

Now it doesn’t deter him and he clears the remaining space between them, reaches out for the arch of her knee but she vanishes in an instant. He says her name, hears her laughing in answer.

“Saint George is supposed to be the patron saint of chivalry. And that beard is a nice touch.” She reappears somewhere else, at the nightstand, flicking on a crystal lamp before flashing away again.

“It’s a disguise.”

“It’s good. Crazy rig driver as opposed to door to door bible banger.” She’s sitting in the chair at the table now, space luke-warm leftovers from his somewhat body heat.

“I’m casing things.”

“You gonna take the job?” She picks up a pen laid forgotten on the table, starts carving into its wooden surface, little _snick snick snicks_ that make a nerve in his eye twitch.

“Haven’t decided yet.”

“I’ll let you know what to do with it, once I figure it out.”

“You don’t know?”

“My heart’s alive but my body’s been lying on that altar in the maze for years, it’s pretty desiccated. It might not be worth it.” She casts a lazy glance at him over her shoulder, hair falling back-- his fingers itch to touch; he curls them into a fist and she’s gone again.

Reappears by the bookshelf, pulls books down from their places, puts them back, “I’ve read most of these. It’s funny, I don’t mean to know certain things but I do.”

“What do you mean?” His head feels fuzzy, a puzzle he isn’t putting together.

“Something about mexican food, you were sitting outside at a picnic table with Seth, you were being a real shit about him not doing anything while he was in prison.”

He blinks, memories on the scope of his vision. “How do you know about that?”

“I miss the glasses,” she says, not answering him. “You look like a prick without them.”

And then she’s gone, and he waits for her to come back, but she doesn’t. He looks at the symbol she cut into the table, a jaguar-deer.

* * *

“I heard it.”

“Heard what?” He looks up from where he’s smearing his blood on the wall, breadcrumb marker so he can find his way back through the labyrinth. This is the third time she’s come to him since he’s been here. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t.

She never lets him touch her.

“When they worshipped me. Or, I guess, talked to me.” She looks unsettled, shy, like she’s in an interrogation room and withholding information.

“Who?”

“The men who run the show.”

A muscle in his palm twitches, wishes he could rip their hearts out like they did hers, and Santanico’s.

“How did it make you feel?”

“Violated.”

He understands.

“I want out,” she says, and for the first time her guard is not up, she is no longer a riddle. Instead she is a scared little girl, trapped forever in a torn-apart body.

He reaches for her hand, expects her to pull away from him, she doesn’t. He grips her fingers softly, afraid to break or harm, show her anymore cruelty than she’s already known. Her eyes are a window, there’s no pulse under his fingertips, no thrum of blood, no life. Her veins are empty, body made of ripped paper and isinglass flesh, nothingness. Her heart is gone, and the air smells like lilac bushes planted in graveyards; it’s making him sick but he pulls her closer. She comes willingly, presses her head to his chest, there’s no sound there either, blood rushing silently, a brittle river, solid bone.

And he can still feel it, then, that light inside of her he’s seen since the start, radiating warmth, kindness, faith, _hope_.

“I’m going to set you free,” he whispers, and she cries silently against his heart.

He finds her body, collects it by torchlight.

* * *

“Do you really want to make it up to me?”

Scott nods, certain, desperate.

“Then help me get the fuck out of here.”

“How?”

“Get my heart. Replace it so they don’t notice.”

“Want me to go find another preacher’s daughter, let her take your place?”

“No. Get an animal’s. Something close to a human. Nothing that will really replace me, not a person.”

“I could use a cow. Though, technically, they’re sacred in some places.”

“Better a cow stuck here than a person. Maybe they can turn it into a cattle ranch.”

“Being dead has made you weird.”

“Same goes to you.”

* * *

He’s put her bones to bed. The RV has a full tank. Gecko’s are known for their getaways. He’s looking at the remains of Kate Fuller when her ghost wafts in.

She looks like ripe summer sunshine, hair twisted up in a knot on top her head, socks missing, bare feet on the dusty steps. There’s no comparison between her and the corpse resting inside the Winnebago. She glows so full of life now, like a sick little trick.

“Scott’s going to meet you soon. It’s some important astrological thing, I forgot what.” She waves her hand flippantly, evening breeze blowing through her hair, like all those femme fatales in the old picture movies he used to watch as a kid.

“Are you really here?” He doesn’t want this to be stop-motion, a reel of film tape that spitters and fizzles out, white bloopers, _please stand by._

“Yeah.”

“Thought you couldn’t go outside.” His fingers flex into fists, he wants to touch her, wants to wrap his arms around her like a black and white movie hero, Marlon Brando or maybe James Dean to the rescue.

“Five feet from the front door isn’t really outside,” she says, stops, ponders. “It’s more like someone hanging on the back of your shirt, momma pulling you back inside the house.”

He knows that feeling, knows the invisible thread pulling at his insides. “On a leash.”

“Yeah. You’ve been away from her for awhile. Doesn’t she notice?” She glances down at her bare feet, like she’s sorry she asked that, like she’s afraid she’s going to be caught in a lie somehow.

He steps closer to her, light, tender, afraid to scare a caged and terrified animal. “She would have, she might be dead, as much as she can be. She had a snake, like your heart, and what would happen if your heart stopped beating?”

“I don’t know.”

“She lied,” he says, the only way he can admit _you’re not like her and that scares me._ It scares him because it makes him question everything, all the days turned to nights, the red of her lips, words in his head, set me free. He did, but at the price of his own conscious will. Not because she expected that, not really, but because he couldn’t let go until it was too late. Until Seth was gone and Kate was dead and he was nothing more than Santanico’s playtoy. She loved him, he knows that much, but only in the way a Goddess can love one of her followers.

The holy do not know what is like to be equals with the ones who worship them; they don’t even bother an attempt. “You tried hard not to.”

Her bare feet don’t leave footprints in the sandy dirt. She kisses him, not like before.

Something new, something that might be the end of the line. Bonnie kissing Clyde before the bullets blast them apart. And he steps back, she follows, hands tugging, legs side stepping his so their hips touch but he can’t feel it when her tongue slips out for his. She sighs, he makes a sound, futile. “End of your leash.”

“Yeah. I’d sneak you into my room but my parents are home.”

“I felt it.”

A little, and he steps closer. There are bikers everywhere, outlaws, half-dressed women with scars and bruised knuckles, no one notices a couple kissing in the dark. His mouth hard on hers, fangs drop and she gasps against them, tongue licking her gums as she detaches from him,  “Maybe it’s because you’re a culebra.”

It’s just words, talk to fill the silence between kisses.

“Maybe.”

He wants to press her up against something but her hand, flat on his chest and pushing pressure into his forward stride has him standing still. Her sad eyes and her admission, “I can’t feel it, I should have let you, the last time.”

“Let me what?”

There’s no blush, no shy pastor’s daughter, just a girl who has regrets about a life lived a little too sinless, “Whatever you wanted. In case this doesn’t end the way we think it should.”

“...”

He watches her swallow, cast a look at the Winnebago. Boldness not enough to hide all the hurt and regret, “You can now if you want.”

“...not much point if you can’t feel it.”

She smirks, coughs to cover a tell-tale shake in her voice, “I could always pretend, girls are supposed to be good at that.”

“This must be the part they leave out of the fairy tales.”

“I always figured, once I was a teenager, that this was the whole point of fairytales.”

“So Saint George only killed a dragon to get laid?”

“He was a knight and technically they only have to serve and protect highbourne ladies.”

“So where does the daughter of a preacher man fit into the hierarchy?”

“Don’t think they had many baptists running around in the time of Charlemagne. They’d probably stone me to death as a witch or something and then centuries later canonize me as Saint Kate.”

“You are. Like Joan of Arc,” he says, almost in awe of the parallel. Then he reconsiders the statement, amends,  “But not the Shakespeare version.”

“What’s wrong with that version?”

“She’s tells everybody she’s pregnant so they don’t burn her and then can’t decide who the father is because each guy they name the English hate even more. Nabokov has a poem where she sleeps with all her knights.”

“Maybe I don’t need a knight, then. Maybe I just need a dragon.”

He’s struck again by how young she is, how perfectly sweet and simple her grace and good girl charm is. Decides he can breath fire for her, goes against his nature and makes a silent promise with his grin not to swallow her whole after.

Her shy smile looks disappointed, but it might just be the way neon light hits her face.

* * *

Scott finds an unexpected ally.

Carlos catches him with his sister heart in his hands.

“Who would have thought?”

“Yeah, really. Says something about his sense of humor.”

They are standing in the kitchen of Carlos’ favorite panaderia, a foot of space between them. Carlos has a shit-eating grin, Scott tries to smile but it warps with distrust and unease. Carlos holds up a black gloved hand.

“Take it. Go.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Scott rolls his eyes. But Carlos’ face slackens from a smile to a non-expression. And as Scott begins to feel the frisson of danger slip down his spine and his fangs start to ache, ready to do what it takes, Carlos cackles.

“I’m just fucking with you.”

“You’re just going to let me leave then?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Sort of. Yeah.”

“I still remember Spain. I remember the services and the churches. Beautiful, not like here, not like now. Golden and painted and…” He waves a hand. “It doesn’t really matter.”

Scott nods.

“I don’t know how she still believes in anything.”

“That’s what faith is _hermano_.”

Scott leaves thinking about high school english class, they read Dante, excerpts, better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven and all of that and suddenly the reverse happening in reality makes his head heavy. He doesn’t really get it, doesn’t grasp much more than Kate must have reached out to every sinner she could, all forgiveness and frugal planning for the endgame.

She was good at chess. Only person who could beat him.

He’s sure of her boundless acceptance and forgiveness, and Carlos’ deep abiding hatred for Narciso.

The universe is built on a handful of certainties and a sea of conindence.

* * *

She stops him, before they go leave for the RV, before she sees her brother for what might be the last time. It’s just him and her in the used to be lair of a goddess.

“They used to give jaguars the hearts, or eagles, and other things. I think out of the two you’re the war twin, you can tell it’s him because of the beard. There’s another god too, his deal is magic and war and jaguars too, obsidian and mirrors, and temptation, they sacrificed to him a lot. Took out the heart and put the skull on a pedestal and ate some parts, wore the person’s skin. So, anyway, my heart might not be enough, nothing might be enough.”

“What happens then?”

“I’m still trying to decide.”

“Are there options?”

“I guess you could eat it.”

He pauses, considers, decides it might not be so bad to live with her in his mind, but the way she tilts her head in mock consternation tells him she isn’t serious.

“If it doesn’t work, bury me in the desert. If you pray over it that’d be nice, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

He wants to kiss her, hard.

But he’s scared she’ll disappear from his arms no matter how tight his hands might hold her.

Kate doesn’t say anything more, but somewhere she thinks about going down in the labyrinth one last time, his hand in hers, a guaranteed happy ending. An eternity, false and sweet and painless, but she can’t lie like that.

* * *

He buries her in the desert, like she asked him to. The stolen prayer book from the church he saw her in makes the inside of his suit jacket dip against his chest. He feels like a traveling preacher,  man of the cloth with a gun in his waistband, knife on his belt, and snakeskin boots when he says some words over the shallow grave. The desert gravel is a poor cross over the hump of dirt. Her heart stopped beating and he felt it.

Scott cried.

Carlos came to collect the kid. They left, Richie doesn’t know where to. Only that they left. It hurts him because somehow he knows it would hurt her.

The red sand cloud unfurling from below the wheels of the car not quite as nice as the Monteroy, but just as black, makes it looks like the skirt of destruction blowing away from a atom bomb test site.

There’s a man in the trunk.

“Oh come on, don’t you want to know what happens when you get sacrificed.”

Professor Tanner spits blood in his face.

“You know, I read a few of your papers.”

The professor pouts, looks at the mound of dirt.

“I like the one about the goddess who is the queen of sacrificial victims”

“I know who Ixtab is and she’s a protector, not a queen.”

“Semantics.”

The there’s blood on the red sand, it turns it an incongruous brown.He smokes a cigarette, dirty smears on the filter from his fingers and he’s hungry, but he doesn’t touch Tanner.

Under the earth there’s a pulse.

He flicks away the cigarette. Scowls because he has to undig her, but there’s the joy of hope, even if he’s gone crazy, like he’s scratching off the final line of fruit decals on a lottery ticket,  and has imagined hearing something that might be as real as a sudden spring of water in the middle of a mexican wasteland where snakes don’t even stick around.

Her first breath rattles and she’s revived to something worse than a unhealthy waif but better than a concentration camp survivor. But she’s been dead longer than Lazarus, longer than fresh dead Jairus’ daughter and he’s not Peter or Paul making a miracle.

Her fingers are sharp like bones on his jaw when his fangs drop. Figures he knows what to do now but her dry tongue and throat can’t make words, and he wants to do it. Make her whole again, perfect and complete but her voice is like dry desert vegetation and dice knocking together. “Don’t do that.”

“You won’t live very long.”

“Take me to a church.”

She can’t walk. He carries her to the car.

They make it to a church. It’s catholic but she says it doesn’t matter so long as it’s got Jesus and Mary and candles. She takes sacrament. They pretend she has leukemia and a priest prays with her. He thinks she looks a little less wraith-y. Tells her so. She smiles and it doesn't look better than a skull grinning but he feels like he’s won some third place lottery prize, it’ll do.

“I feel dirty.”

“Well, you were in the ground.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Every word is hard for her to push past thin, cracked lips. “Dirty, like I need another baptism.”

They drive.

She looks infinitesimally better, more nourished, he might be imagining it. He feeds. She sleeps like a corpse in the passenger seat, even the lowest light hurts her eyes and he can’t drive as fast as he’d like.

“I should have had sex with you.”

He grins.

“Before, at the twister.”

He agrees but doesn’t say anything, wonders if they had if it would have been poolside at a make-believe dew drop inn or the RV or Satanico’s bed or hers from wherever home used to be. He keeps his thoughts to himself says, instead, “You need a pineapple burger, then we’ll talk.”

“You need to find Seth.”

He knows that, but doesn’t acknowledge that she’s right just asks, “And what about you?” fingers moving from the stick shift to catch her wrist, ulna and radius like two brittle sticks against his palm. Rods he wants to self flagellate with, punishment for all his half-absolved sins.

She doesn’t try to break free, couldn’t even if, her eyes are very large in her sunken sockets, “What about me?”

“What if I want company?” he asks, first time he’s been hesitant, unsure, anxious in a long while. He doesn’t want her to leave, not after he went to all this trouble trying to get her back.

“I need to go save Scott,” she says. “ _My_ brother.”

“After what he did?”

“That doesn’t matter. Family is family.”

“Nice to see you still have some kind of moral compass.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“So what, you’re just going to go back into that place now that you’re free? Let them cut your heart out again, have some other poor sap get it back, bathe you Elizabeth Bathory style, bury you down in good old Me-he-co soil and wait for you to come back?”

She bats an eye at the suggestion, still Kate under all the starved flesh and visible notches of bone and missing tufts of hair, shrugs, tilts, not used to corporeal limbs, or maybe not used to the state of desiccation they are in, “Any better ideas?”

“Come with me.” He stops. Amends, “I mean stay and come with me, after you’re better. Don’t leave.”

“Looking for someone to hold your hand, Gecko?”

“Yes.”

Kate, hesitant, looks at him through slanted, paper-thin eyelids. “We’d have to save Scott. After.”

“Seth’s always been better at extraction.”

“What if he doesn’t want to help us?” she asks, eyes looking tawny, but not because she’s half-dead. Rather, because she might be on the verge of crying, if there’s anything left inside of her that can let the tears slip out. “It involves dealing with Carlos, and he _hates_ Carlos. He won’t help us.”

“He will.”

“Why?”

“Family’s family, remember?”

She smirks, tears to the wayside, set of Cheshire teeth, false razor blades in her bone heavy face,  “Only if you agree not to bite.”

He smiles, relieved. “No promises.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
